Since the vectorball idea died so quickly, I was pondering what I could do with the codebase. So I picked up another idea of mine, to make a sidescrolling shooter with all content procedurally generated. All images and sounds in the game will be created by the program itself, from random numbers and some graphics shuffling. And bits and bytes and magic. Or so

At the moment I have a starfield sort of background, an untextured tunnel shape, and one way to create enemy ships. No collision detection yet, no scoring and no game ... I'll work on that someday soon. Also I want to more variance in enemy ship designs, and a tunnel rock texture, and decorations.

For a brief moment I thought it might be something for the Java4k contest, but the jar file is 17k if I strip the debug info, and have it compressed, that seems to be way too big to try and shrink it into 4k. So I'll let that be, although I think that a shooter with procedural content generation might be a project candidate for the Java4k contest.

Overall I'm quite pleased with the progress on this project. It's been easier than I thought, and the procedural content seems quite alright for the time spent on the routines. Actually it's quite fun to fly along and watch the enemy shapes and the explosion colors. Particlarly the dendril ships have a huge variety of shapes.

Just played it and your collision detection is very odd. 80% of the time a bullet hits an object, nothing happens. I like the whole concept, but made you should make it so that the player loses lives when they hit the tunnel's edges. Good work.

Found the following bugs:Hittest against wall is very glitchy.Bullets fly trough walls (maybe intended, but it would make the game more interesting when the wall stops bullets).Explosion is kinda slow, at first i thought my game was lagging.Enemy's fly trough each other, and the flying patters are really simple, maybe the enemys should swarm less.

Yup, collision works now and all bullets hit instead of having some pass through.

Good to know. I found another problem in the collision checks enemy vs. ship, but I must spend more time on investigations. The ship vs. tunnel check is very coarse, too, but I'm confident that I can improve that once I spend a bit more time on it (currently only tests ship bounding box vs. tunnel spikes).

Screenshot featuring the "winged ship" design improvements:

@RobinB:

It's intended that bullets can pass through walls, the enemies can do that too I'm not quite decided if it's a good or bad feature, but I think it can stay for the moment.

The enemy flight pattern will be improved, but it will need a bit of time to include splines and set up other grouping patterns than just lines.

I'll investigate the explosions. On my system they start quite immediately when a enemey is destroyed. What is the exact problem, are explosions delayed after an enemy is destroyed, or is the animation going too slow?

A little update:

The current state of the project includes one one new feature: random mines, which block the tunnel. Well, also a slightly improved bullet vs. enemy check, not sure if it will make much of a difference though.

Some day I want to try that with other genres too, particularly with adventure or role playing games. But those are quite complex, so I wanted to start my studies with something easy. But it helps to make games which one can play oneself as developer, and still be surprised now and then

Well it makes the random walls much more interesting if your bullets cant pass tough, but yeah it does not matter.The animation itself is really slow, each frame is delayed like 1 to 2 seconds.But besides this, the game is already really nice.

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